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MONTREAL—A top Parti Québécois minister has warned that Quebec’s divided sovereigntist movement could ruin any chances of the party holding a referendum in the next four years.

Even as PQ Leader Pauline Marois tries to shift the focus of her campaign away from independence, Jean-François Lisée was busy Wednesday promoting the dream of Quebec separatists to try and rally voters to the PQ.

Lisée — Marois’ international relations minister and a strategic adviser to the party during the 1995 referendum — told a university audience that it was the left-wing sovereigntist party Québec Solidaire that prevented the PQ from winning 11 seats and a majority government in the last provincial election.

“I hope that we can have a referendum in the next mandate . . . I’m in a rush. I want to do it as soon as possible,” he said in response to an audience question. “But if on April 7 we’re short by 11 ridings that we would have had if Québec Solidaire had not divided the vote . . . it’s possible we won’t even be able to get to sovereignty in the next mandate.”

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The antipathy between the PQ and Québec Solidaire in the current campaign is palpable. It was only heightened by the PQ’s recruitment of Pierre Karl Péladeau, the former president of the Quebecor media empire whose history of worker lockouts and contract negotiations has left him with an infamous reputation among the province’s labour unions. Québec Solidaire, which counts unionists as one of its core constituencies, held a press conference outside Quebecor’s Montreal headquarters to denounce Péladeau’s candidacy.

But Lisée recalled the enlightened sacrifice of the radical left-wing separatist leader Pierre Bourgault in letting his Rassemblement pour l’indépendance nationale be absorbed in 1968 into René Lévesque’s PQ, a turning point in the sovereignty movement that would form government for the first time in 1976.

“The socialists of that era understood that you can’t divide the vote,” Lisée said.

But with an opinion poll this week showing the Quebec Liberal party pulling slightly ahead of the stagnant PQ and support for Québec Solidaire having grown, Marois’ party is taking a more aggressive approach as the election moves into a new phase marked by Thursday’s election debate, the first of two where party leaders will face off on television.

That approach involved PQ Democratic Institutions Minister Bernard Drainville resurrecting the controversial PQ values charter, which proposes to ban public servants such as teachers, doctors, nurses and daycare workers from wearing religious articles in the workplace. The charter legislation, which died when Marois called the election, is thought to have been responsible for the PQ’s rise in support earlier this year.

Drainville said he has visited 15 different ridings in the first two weeks of the campaign and has heard a resounding cry of support for the initiative.

“What my tour has confirmed is that Quebecers want their charter,” he said.

But he said that only a majority PQ government can make it happen ― that a Liberal government led by Philippe Couillard would never revive the initiative and the third-place Coalition Avenir Québec would water it down.

“We are facing a fundamental choice in this election,” Drainville said. “It’s a choice for the future that is extremely important and that we’ve been waiting on for a long time.”

Despite the strong support for the values charter Drainville said those in favour have faced a barrage of criticism. The Marois government has been compared to racist and dictatorial regimes like that of Vladimir Putin in Russia, the fascist Francisco Franco in Spain and France’s far-right political party, Front National.

He said supporters of the charter should not feel ashamed to back the initiative, which he said is meant to ensure gender equality and the secular nature of the province. That segment of the Quebec population has been bullied into silence, but Drainville said they can make their voices heard at the ballot box by ensuring a PQ majority.

“One of the best things that has happened since this debate began last September is that the silent majority has stood up. Faced with a media frenzy against the charter, Quebecers have stood up.

“The silent majority is for the charter and it’s for them and all Quebecers that we want to have this charter.”

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